Skye McAlpine: ‘Venice was at top of spice route and it has a melting pot of cultures’

Although she’s not a professionally trained chef, McAlpine’s recipes have won huge popularity as lovingly-formed slices of Italian life.

Her food journey started with a blog, From My Dining Table, which has been transformed into a cookbook, called A Table In Venice. Here, McAlpine talks about her love of cooking, and how we could all make our dining tables a little more Venetian.

The personal connection of food McAlpine is obsessed with poring over cookbooks. “I really enjoyed my PhD in 17th and 18th century English translations of Latin love poetry, but it was a real conversation killer at dinner parties,” she says with a giggle. “What was so lovely about writing about food is  it’s a fantastic way to connect with pretty much everyone – everyone eats.”

McAlpine started her blog in 2014, and has won a legion of fans.

It’s straight from the home Few things could be more personal than McAlpine’s recipes. She and her husband Anthony, and their toddler son Aeneas, now split their time between London, where McAlpine was born, and Venice where she grew up.

She does all her own photography – but admits it has been a learning curve. “When I started the blog, it was frustrating. The food looked nice on the table, but it didn’t look like that in the picture,” she recalls.

Ever the student, McAlpine swotted up on food photography and styling and invested in a decent camera.

“Shooting the book myself feels like a way of telling my story more personally,” McAlpine explains. “It’s definitely not perfect, but it feels very honest, and it’s very me.”

Using her own kitchen adds to the homely feel of the book – and indeed her whole approach to food. “It’s a big rambling house, and it’s very Italian of us to have three generations living there at one time,” McAlpine adds of the family’s Italian home.

Why Venetian cuisine is king McAlpine is preoccupied with the history of Italian food – something sharpened by the surroundings of Venice.

“Because it’s such a crumbling and old city, it does encourage you to focus on the history,” she says. “If you love history and stories like I do, Venice is like a toy box full of wonders.”

This feeds into the recipes that she has created, such as her favourite breakfast of kiefer – almond paste croissants that became part of Venetian cuisine during the early 19th century Austrian occupation.

So what sets Venetian cuisine apart from other areas in Italy? “Italian food is usually very fresh and simple flavours, so what’s most interesting about Venetian food is its unusual use of spices,” McAlpine explains.

“Because of Venice’s history as the top of the spice route and a melting pot of cultures, there is a lot of spice – cardamom, cinnamon, pink peppercorns, bay leaves and saffron – all these flavours run through otherwise quite plain and simple dishes, which I think is really nice.”

But she’s not afraid of mixing things up Having roots in two countries has given McAlpine a fresh take on Venetian cuisine. “If you grow up in Italy, you have a strong sense there is a right and a wrong way to eat things.

Anglo-Saxon culture is more adventurous, and we get more excited by fusion and blurring the lines and new ways of using things,” she says.

This means that while McAlpine is strictly Italian in some senses (you won’t in a million years find her eating pasta with chicken), she’s more open to experimentation in others – she tells a hilarious story of a fruit seller’s horror when he found out she was making a distinctly untraditional apple, rose and thyme tart.

“That is the weird thing when you come from one place and live in another – I’m not really British, I’m not really Italian,” she says. “It is nice to pick and choose.”

As for her advice to anyone wanting to dip their toe in Venetian cooking: “Start with what you like,” she says simply. “That’s best way to get excited, because we all have different tastes.

“Because I’m a self-taught home cook, and these are recipes I cook at home, they’re all incredibly simple and quite intuitive,” McAlpine adds.

ASPARAGUS LINGUINE

INGREDIENTS: SERVES 4
1tbsn olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
400g asparagus, trimmed and cut into 3-5cm lengths
100ml prosecco
A handful of flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped
400g linguine
30g salted butter
30g Parmesan, grated
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

METHOD
1 Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat, then add the onion and a generous pinch of salt. Cook, stirring, over a low-medium heat for five to 10 minutes, until the onion becomes translucent.
2 Add the asparagus and prosecco, then season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring, for about five minutes, until all the liquid has evaporated and the asparagus is tender. If it is not quite done by the time the wine evaporates, add just enough water to cover the base of the pan and cook for a little longer. Stir in the parsley.
3 Meanwhile, cook the linguine in a large saucepan of generously salted boiling water until al dente. Just before you drain the pasta, scoop half a cup of the cooking water out of the pot and set to one side. Drain the pasta, toss it back into the saucepan and mix in the reserved cooking water, little by little, and the butter. Stir well, then add the asparagus mixture. Give everything one last good stir and top with the grated Parmesan.

ZABIAONE AND MERINGUE SEMIFREDDO

INGREDIENTS: (Serves 10-12)
1/2 lemon
6 large egg whites
300g caster sugar
For the zabaione:
6 large egg yolks
100g caster sugar
70ml Marsala
300ml whipping cream
METHOD
1 Make the meringue layers first. Heat the oven to 140°C/Gas Mark 1. Line three large baking trays with baking parchment and draw a 24cm circle on each piece of paper. Turn the paper over so you can still see the lines and use them as guides.
2 Rub a large bowl down with the lemon half to cut through any grease. Put the egg whites into the bowl and, using a handheld electric mixer, beat on a low-medium speed until the whites begin to froth. Increase the speed to high and add the sugar a tablespoon at a time until the whites become glossy and form stiff peaks. Spoon the meringue onto the baking parchment and spread it out evenly within the circles.
3 Bake for 1 hour 10 minutes, then switch off the oven and leave the meringues in there, without opening the door, for an hour longer, until the oven has cooled. Take the meringues out of the oven and leave them to cool on the trays.
4 Now make the zabaione cream filling. Put the egg yolks and sugar into a heatproof bowl and whisk with a handheld electric mixer for two to three minutes, until light and fluffy. As the mixture begins to froth up, set the bowl over a pan of gently simmering water, making sure the water isn’t touching the base of the bowl. Keep whisking until the mixture is thick enough for a trail to stay on the surface when drizzled from the whisk. Slowly pour in the Marsala, whisking all the while. This should take three to five minutes, and as you add the liquid, the zabaione will double in size and thicken. Remove the bowl from the heat and let the zabaione cool to room temperature, whisking occasionally to prevent a skin forming.
5 In a separate bowl, beat the whipping cream until it forms soft peaks. Gently fold it into the cooled zabaione. To assemble the semifreddo, place one of the meringue layers on a serving plate, and spread half the zabaione cream over it. Top with a second layer of meringue, then the rest of the zabaione cream, and finish with the final layer of meringue. Freeze for three to four hours, or longer, until set. Slice like a cake to serve.
ALMOND PASTE CROISSANTS

INGREDIENTS: (Makes 10)
2 x 320g ready-rolled puff pastry sheets
1 large egg yolk, lightly beaten
30g flaked almonds
2tbsp icing sugar
For the filling:
90g ground almonds
70g caster sugar
1.5tsp apricot jam
A pinch of salt
1 large egg white, lightly beaten with a fork

METHOD
1 Heat the oven to 220°C/Gas Mark 7.
To make the filling, put the ground almonds, sugar, jam and salt in a bowl and mix well. Add the egg white and stir until you have a thick paste, rather like marzipan.
2 Lay out the puff pastry sheets on a work surface and cut out five triangles from each one, 12-14cm wide at the base and 24cm long on the sides. Spoon a teaspoon of almond paste on to the base of each triangle, centred and about two-fingers’ width away from the edge. Don’t be tempted to overfill: you really just need a teaspoon, or the filling will spill out in the oven. Fold the bottom edge of the triangle over the filling, trying to tuck it under, and roll the pastry up as tightly as you can. Gently fold the tips under into the horns of a croissant, pinching where needed to seal. Repeat this with the remaining pastry triangles, then arrange on a baking sheet lined with baking parchment.
3 Brush the croissants with the beaten egg yolk to glaze, then sprinkle liberally with the flaked almonds. Bake for 20 minutes, until golden all over. Remove
the tray from the oven and sift the
icing sugar generously over the piping-hot croissants, so that some of it melts into them. Let them cool slightly, then transfer to a wire rack. Eat warm or cold.

A Table In Venice: Recipes From My Home by Skye McAlpine, is published
by Bloomsbury, priced £26. It is available now.